Grace-Empowered Prayer

This morning, we are talking about the topic of prayer. The past few weeks, you may remember we have been dealing with grace as a theme. A few weeks ago, we looked at how grace is the very thing that not only saves us but empowers us to a holy living. That we have not simply been sort of set aside and we are waiting for the pie in the sky when we die, but that grace is the very thing that motivates our transformed lives to live the way that Jesus lived, to grow into the likeness, as Paul says, of Jesus. Last week, we looked at the very dangerous counter agent of grace, which is pride and self righteousness, and we looked at how Jesus told the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector and how we can so often take the good things that God has given us out of his grace, including our salvation perhaps, and turn it into something that we think we have somehow earned or deserve.

And how really at the heart of grace is a heart that is humble, willing to receive the thing that we have never been able to earn. And ultimately that is obviously salvation in Christ. We press that theme a little bit more now when we come to prayer and really the idea of us being transformed in our relation, our lived relationship with God. That grace transforms how we relate to God, how we understand God, how we speak to God. And we are going to look at a wonderful example of a prayer marked by grace, perhaps surprisingly by going to the Old Testament.

We associate grace as, you know, the New Testament discovery when that is absolutely false. From beginning to the end, grace is found in the Bible. And we are going to look at Daniel's prayer in Daniel chapter 9 this morning. And we are going to see how this man, Daniel, a man of prayer, prayed understanding how God works in grace. Daniel 9:1-19.

In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, by descent a Mede, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans. In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that according to the word, excuse me, of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely seventy years. Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession saying, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules.

We have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us belongs open shame as at this day, to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, and all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. To us, O Lord, belongs open shame. To our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers because we have sinned against you.

To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness for we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in his laws, which he set before us by his servants, the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. And the curse and oath that are written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us because we have sinned against him. He has confirmed his words which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us by bringing upon us a great calamity. For under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what has been done against Jerusalem.

As it is written in the law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us, yet we have not entreated the favour of the Lord our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth. Therefore, the Lord has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works that he has done, and we have not obeyed his voice. And now, O Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and have made a name for yourself as at this day, we have sinned, we have done wickedly. O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city, Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now, therefore, our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy and for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate.

O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear. O Lord, forgive.

O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name. So, Father, word of the Lord. Very quickly, as we get to this passage, we find Daniel praying this prayer. We are told in the first year of Darius, which places us around May, probably approximately 600 or so into the exile.

Daniel had, we are told, been reading the Bible, specifically the words of the prophet Jeremiah. And so we know that he has either got into Jeremiah 25 or Jeremiah 29, where in those passages, God has said that after seventy years, he would return his people back to the land of Israel. This is what Jeremiah says. This is what the Lord says. When seventy years are completed for you in Babylon, I will come to you and fulfil my good promise to bring you back to this place.

So Daniel is doing his devotion. He reads in Jeremiah that there is seventy years of exile that is nearly finished, and from that, Daniel begins to pray. Now we also know that throughout the book of Daniel, Daniel is a man of prayer. In chapter two, when he was asked to interpret the deep dream of Nebuchadnezzar without any context, without knowing even what the dream was, we are told that Daniel prays to God for enlightenment. He prays that God will give him understanding.

In verses 19 to 23 of chapter two, when he correctly interprets the dream, Daniel prays a prayer of thanksgiving, thanking God. Famously, we know this as well. In chapter six, Daniel, we are told, prays three times a day. That is his normal custom. That is his practice.

But even when he is told by the king to stop praying to any god, any god that is not a prayer that is sort of directed to the king or perhaps the god of the Babylonians, Daniel continues to pray and for that very reason, Daniel is thrown into the den of lions. Daniel, in the book of Daniel, is a man known by prayer. Prayer for guidance, prayer of thanks, a man who prayed consistently day after day, week after week, year after year. And so when we get to chapter nine, to see Daniel in prayer is no surprise. But like I said, what I want us to look at this morning is the model of prayer which we find in these words that centres the prayer on the understanding of God's character and on his grace specifically.

Our prayer lives will be transformed if we take on board the same principles by which Daniel prayed. Firstly, the one principle we see is that it is a prayer that was according to who God is. The implication or the application for us is to know our Bibles. Daniel prayed, we know, with a great understanding of who God is, who God was. And he knew who God was based on the scriptures.

Daniel's prayer is sparked. It is initiated by reading God's word. He reads the prophet Jeremiah. But even as you work through what he prays, the very language of his prayer shows us that he understood the Old Testament. He does not pray by some sort of equivalent new age understanding of what the Babylonians understood God to be and sort of had that seep into his prayer life.

He prays a biblical prayer. He prays a prayer based on what he knows God to be based on the Bible, in his case, the Old Testament. He knows what God has done for his ancestors in Egypt. He knows what God has promised Abraham in the covenant. He knows what God has promised the people of Israel, of who God will be to them.

And how does he know that? He knows that because he knows God's word. Listen to the distinct statements that Daniel makes about God's character. Have a look at verse four. O Lord, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments.

Daniel is referring to Abraham. Verse seven, to you, O Lord, belongs righteousness. Verse nine, to the Lord our God belongs mercy and forgiveness. He is referring there to the law, the righteousness of God, the God who is holy, set apart, good. To the Lord belongs righteousness.

And then verse 14, the Lord has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works he has done. It is a reference to what the prophets have said. I mean, mentions a few times that the words of the prophet have told us these things. Daniel knows the important things of God. These are theological truths being uttered by Daniel in his prayer.

But the amazing thing is, this is not a sermon. This is a private prayer. It is a prayer that grounds everything in an intimate knowledge of God and his character. The example of Daniel's prayer is one of praying prayers that remember and even appeal to the character of God and how he has revealed himself to us in Scripture. Why can Daniel appeal to the mercy of God?

Why does Daniel do that? Because he knows God is a merciful God. God has been merciful in the past. He says in verse 15, at one time you were merciful to our people by rescuing them from Egypt with a mighty hand. Why does Daniel ask God to stick to his promise to Jeremiah to rescue Israel after seventy years?

Because, says Daniel, God was righteous in the first place by sending our fathers into the exile. If God is righteous in executing justice, sticking to the promise of the curse of the covenant, if God is righteous in executing that just justice, is not God also going to be righteous in fulfilling his promise of restoration? Now ask yourself, why do you pray the things that you pray? Have you ever wondered to yourself, am I allowed to pray these things? And you might instinctively feel and know that you should not pray for a Lamborghini, but why?

And if not a Lamborghini, what are you allowed to ask God for? You can answer that question, what am I allowed to ask of God in prayer? By knowing the things he has told us we can pray for. And how do you know the things that you can ask for? By knowing the things that relate to the promises he has given us in his word.

That is the equation. Our prayer lives are transformed when we know God's character. The first thing we learn from Daniel is the amazing thing of bringing God's attention, not that he has forgotten mind you, but bringing God's attention to the truth that God has revealed about himself to us. So how do we know we can pray for our unsaved non-Christian friends? Because we know God is a saving God who has, at one point, reached out to desperately lost heathen people like Abram from Chaldea.

He reached the most unrepentant hostile opponent of Christianity in Saul of Tarsus, that is Paul, and he saved them. We can ask God to supply our every need because Jesus said that we can ask for our daily bread from our heavenly Father. We can ask these things from God because we know his character and we know his promises. And we know these things because we know his word. So that is the first principle, pray according to who God is.

The second thing is to pray with the right attitude, and we also see that in Daniel. Daniel knew his place and the place of his people before God. Apart from the words actually that Daniel speaks in his humility, we are also given an insight into the posture of his heart by how he physically approached God. Verse three says, then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. Fasting is sacrificing food from the body for the sake of prioritising prayer.

Sackcloth, we know was an unsophisticated, rough material that was not particularly pretty, and was an irritant to the skin. It sat poorly on you and it made you feel uncomfortable. And then ashes represents absolute desperation or ruin, devastation. In other words, Daniel's physical approach to God, his appearance before God is one of desperation. And while Daniel knows intimately the character of the God he is praying for, he knows and he remembers what God promised Jeremiah.

He knows who God was towards Israel in his covenants. He knows that God is righteous. And yet we see an attitude of Daniel that does not presume anything of God. He does not assume God is going to act, that God is obliged to act. David Hellam, in his commentary on Daniel writes, the point to take in here is that while Daniel had good reason to believe that God would hear him based upon Jeremiah, his confidence was not attended by so much as an ounce of presumption.

Confidence in God should not become presumption upon God. So Daniel's physical posture, the way that he comes to God shows that he understands just how guilty Israel was before God, having broken their covenant responsibilities to him. They are guilty. He knows it. In the very way that Daniel dresses and approaches God, he shows this.

We are ruined, God. We are without anything that we can bring to you to offer. But then it is not just physically, externally what Daniel has, it is the words by which he prays that shows his attitude. This is a prayer that understands the brokenness that has led to this prayer for mercy. Specifically, Daniel knew that it was sin that brought about this calamity.

Have a look in verse five. We have sinned and done wrong. Verse seven. To us belong open shame. Verse nine.

We have rebelled against you and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God. The very moving thing about Daniel's prayer is its honesty. The blame is never shifted. Notice that Daniel never says that it was our forefathers' fault. Even though he mentions the fathers, his fathers that went before him that are accomplices here.

They are contributors to this situation. Neither does Daniel blame his leaders, even though he mentions our kings and our princes. They are also accomplices here. And even though, as other parts like Ezekiel will say, the leaders do bear real responsibility in the situation of Israel, Daniel says it was our sin. We rebelled.

He includes himself as a participant in that. In our prayer life, it will do us well to be very aware of the state of our hearts when we pray. In most cases, in the human heart, in how we speak to ourselves, I suspect you often hear something like this. God, please do this for me because I should be treated this way. God, please teach so and so this lesson because they need to be this way towards me.

Lord, please bless and protect my son because my family deserves to be treated this way. Lord, my landlord needs to treat me this way because I am a good tenant. Lord, this customer relations person should treat me this way because that is how good business is done. Why? Why do our prayer lives sound like that?

Because of our internal dialogue, the way that we think about ourselves and what we do deserve and that seeping into the way we pray. It is because I deserve it. And the Bible's brutal, at least sobering assertion is that no, you and I do not deserve anything. Now I think we know that in our minds, but do we know that in our hearts? You and I do not deserve anything.

Israel and Daniel had sinned greatly. He acknowledges that. And God, he says, has acted righteously in how he behaved in his anger. And this reality makes Daniel approach God so humbly. Tim Keller in his book Prodigal God mentions how often Jesus taught about this concept of humility as being the way, the single way of entering the kingdom.

We saw that last week, did not we, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Keller writes, the humble are in, the proud are out. The people who confess that they are not particularly good, they are not particularly open minded, they are the ones that are seen to be moving towards God because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know that you need it. The people who think that they are just fine, thank you very much, the ones that believe that they deserve God's ear, they are the ones that are moving away from God. He says when a newspaper once posed the question, what is wrong with the world?

And invited people to write in. The Christian writer, GK Chesterton, reputedly wrote a letter in response. Dear sirs, what is wrong with the world? I am. Sincerely, GK Chesterton.

If the overriding, continuous claim of the Bible is true, if we are sinful creatures corrupted in our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, prone to rebellion against God, and yet everything we get from him is a gift purely by the sheer kindness of God, we cannot lay claim on anything. I want good health, Lord, because I deserve a good life. I deserve to be healthy. I deserve to be treated well in this church, Lord, because I do so much for it.

I am a kind person, Lord. I deserve to be treated better. Is that what God owes us? God does not owe us. And with Daniel comes this sobriety, O Lord, the great and awesome God, you are righteous and we are not.

A prayer marked with humility is a prayer that knows your place before a great and awesome and righteous God. Think about that word awesome. Like, twenty first century people, we have ruined that word awesome. Awesome is such a flat word now. It sort of just bounces off us.

Awesome is not something that you can imagine. It is not something that you experience with the mind. To be in awe, to say that God is awesome is to feel how great, how majestic, how holy he is, and to feel how insignificant and flawed you are in comparison. Daniel begins his prayer by saying, you are awesome, God. You are great and you are righteous.

And he knows in comparison, I am not, we are not. But please, God, listen to this prayer. It is a prayer life, firstly, knowing who God is and then secondly, knowing who we are in relation to him. And that causes a prayer life that is grounded in humility and that is the beginning of the attitude of prayer. Now you may ask, well, if God does not owe us anything, why should we pray?

What hope is there in praying in the first place? If we have no right to lay claim on anything, then is it wrong to ask God? Well, not if you realise that when we pray, we appeal to the grace of God. We can pray because God is gracious. That is the third point.

Understand the power behind the prayer. You could be mistaken if you closed your eyes and you heard and listened to this prayer for the first time with no awareness of its context, and you could have thought that this is the great apostle of grace praying, Paul himself. You could listen to this prayer and think this is something that belongs somewhere in Romans. Not because we are righteous, God, because you are. Because you are merciful, God, not because of what we have done.

Those are the words of Paul found in the Old Testament. Listen again to Daniel's appeal to God in restoring Jerusalem, verses 17 to 19. Now therefore, our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy. And for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline your ear and hear.

Open your eyes and see our desolations and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear. O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act.

Delay not for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name. Daniel appeals for the restoration of Jerusalem based on God's mercy and the fact that God's own name is linked with this people, Israel. Now we know mercy and grace often in the Bible go hand in hand together. God's mercy means that he does not give us the things that we deserve. We deserve punishment.

God in his mercy does not punish us. Grace means we receive something that we do not deserve. We do not deserve forgiveness. God gives it to us anyway. While Daniel technically only prays here to God for mercy, he is really asking for mercy and grace.

On the one hand, he prays, God, please stop punishing us even though you are right in doing so. And then he prays, please give us back Jerusalem and the temple even though we have shown that we do not deserve to carry your name. When we come with humility before God in prayer, in light of who he is, understanding who we are, the mind boggling thing is this, that God commands us to pray and ask anyway. He does not, in fact, tell us that we can have a choice of bringing our heart's desires to him, our petitions before him. He commands us, in fact, to pray.

It is an astounding thought. When we have no right to demand anything, God says in his grace, come and bring it anyway. When we pray as Christians, we pray with confidence because we know God is gracious. Daniel shows us the example of being of God being appealed to, of asking God for his intervention in spite of who he was. Biblical praying means we put our hope in the power of God's grace to grant us the things we humbly ask for.

The last point for us this morning is to pray with hope. After Daniel prays for God's grace, for his mercy upon his people in verses one through to 19, our passage that we read, have a look at what happens next. He writes that the angel Gabriel is then sent to him. God acts immediately. He sends Gabriel to come and give him a message in verses 20 to 27.

And the message that Daniel receives is one of hope, that a time is coming, verse 24, when there will be an end to sin, an atonement for wickedness, that there will come a time of everlasting righteousness. That is the response of God to Daniel's prayer. The angel says to Daniel that it will be seventy weeks in the ESV or literally seventy sevens that would need to pass from Daniel's prayer until this event would happen, this end to sin. Now there are many people that have spilt a lot of ink trying to understand the seventy sevens and what that is referring to. The most passionate interpreters, I dare say, are the ones that relate to this to the end times of Jesus' final return and the end of the world.

And there are all sorts of calculations of how that 70 sevens fits into the narrative of the Bible. But I dare say for most reformed thinkers, the general consensus is that the number seven, which we know is highly symbolic of perfection and completeness in the Bible, Revelation talks again and again of God being seven seven seven. Perfection. Completeness. If seven is a number of perfection and 70 sevens is referring to that, then it is entirely possible that it simply means in God's perfect timing.

An end to sin will happen, an atonement for wickedness will happen. But there is also this tantalising reality, for me at least, that 70 sevens can also be translated as 70 times seven. And 70 times seven in terms of years is 490. Right? I checked my calculator.

That is what it is. Now if you think about it this way, Daniel's prayer is made around 500 BC in that sort of period. Seventy times seven years, which is how this could be translated, is around 490. May, April, what happens at that switch in history? Jesus comes.

What does the angel Gabriel say will happen in seventy sevens? An end to sin, an atonement for wickedness, everlasting righteousness. Biblical praying means we put our hope in the power of God's grace because that grace was supremely shown to us, confirmed to us in Jesus Christ. We know God is gracious. We know we can have a confidence in praying to God because Jesus came.

Daniel knows that God is a God of mercy and grace. We see that God would not overlook the terrible sins of Israel, that God in his righteousness would send them into exile, but that God in his righteousness would restore them because he had made a promise and he keeps his promises. But 500 years later, he would send Jesus Christ, his Son, to die for Israel's sin, to put an end to it. We know that Jesus did not die just for Israel. He died for the world.

And his mercy and his grace and God's character was shown most gloriously in the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So we pray according to who we know God to be. We come in humility to him because we know who we are in relation to that. We know that we can appeal to all the good things of God because he is gracious. And then lastly, we know we can pray with confidence and hope because his grace is real and his grace was shown to us fully and completely in Jesus Christ.

Let our prayers be marked with wonder, let it be marked with joy and adoration for who God is, asking him for all our needs because we know what he can do for us because he has already done it in Jesus Christ. Let us come to him now in prayer. Let us pray together. God, if we could simply bottle the experience and the understanding of this moment again as it relates to our prayer life, if we could just understand what an awesome privilege, in the fullness of that word, what an awesome privilege it is to come before the perfect righteous God, to understand what an astounding bit of grace it would be that could bring us from our depths into the throne room of the heavenly king, and that we could bring our hearts' desires to him, that we could ask according to his character as our Father, our provider, our protector, our shield, that we could ask all those things of him because he has graciously shown himself to us. God, if we could bottle all of those truths and remember it, there would not be a moment in our lives where we would be complacent in praying.

There would not be a time where we would be fearful about what we may ask. There would not be a time when our prayers would be shallow and selfish. Lord, we would leave those moments of prayer blown away by your mercy and your grace and your love. And in view of what you have done for us ultimately in Jesus, Lord, our hearts would be made right. And whatever burdens we are carrying, whatever we sense is still wrong in this world, would pale into the background of your greatness and your awesomeness.

Lord, by your Holy Spirit, make these truths linger in our hearts. By your Holy Spirit, remind us of these things. Where we still lack prayer, where we do not pray enough, Lord, please give us the joy. Remind us of what it means to come to you, what we can get from coming to you. And, Lord, where our prayers are too shallow, Lord, help us to dig deep, to know you, to be reminded of who you are and what we may be in light of who you are.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.